Just to clarify, this isn’t a normal toothless petition, this is an official EU mechanism that allows citizens to bring problems to the attention of the European Commission, and force them to pass judgement on it legally. You can read more about it here.
It’s good to be skeptical of anything asking for that personal info, but I’d suggest researching into it to confirm that it is indeed legit.
I suspect they would’ve brushed it off regardless, they didn’t want to deal with it. There’s another 100k UK petition (The one linked to at the bottom of the OP text) that would force them to re-look at it with more depth which is also ending quite soon.
The campaign was designed to save all future games, The Crew was just a useful catalyst to launch from, since it was a very visible example of what they were fighting against.
But yes, saving games is pretty minor compared to stopping literal fascism. It’s just a shame that PirateSoftware fucked the campaign so hard, and stopped a big influencer from basically pressing the ‘win’ button by talking about it.
MS-DOS games are pretty much what GOG built their business on, they still sell quite well. 50’s music is still listened by many (over 57 million views on that one song alone), and often used in movies, though that’s a bit of an odd comparison, almost as if old things aren’t worth keeping around. I mean, people still listen to classical music that’s hundreds of years old at this point, read ancient stories, and look at art from artists long dead. I consider games to be an art form like any other, and worth preserving.
As the graph breaks down, some games are patched by companies to allow them to function offline or to enable self-hosted servers. Mostly its fan efforts to reverse engineer the server code, though.
The point of the stop killing games campaign is to legislate by law that going forward, developers/publishers would have to account for a way to allow the player to host a server or patch the game to run offline when they become unprofitable and are shut down.
That does seem to be an influence, though oddly there are some modern wildly popular games, Minecraft being a prime example, that still allow you to self host your own server, so it shouldn’t really be as foreign of a concept as it appears to be to some younger folk.